Glory Days

August 5, 2001

https://www.smartertimes.com/500/glory-days

A dispatch from Moscow in today's New York Times reports on a meeting between President Putin and Kim Jong Il. The Times reports, "For the event, the Kremlin restored an honor guard that had been removed from Lenin's Tomb after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The entire affair was filmed by North Korean crews using ancient 35 millimeter film cameras -- an eerie scene which, to older Russians, recalled the glory days of Soviet rule."

"Glory days"? For Russians, there was nothing glorious at all about being stuck under the boot of a totalitarian Communist dictatorship.

The same article asserts that Russia "opposes" an American missile shield "for fear it would challenge its own arsenal and scuttle an important arms control agreement with the United States." It's unclear how the Times is so confident in its understanding of Russian motivation that it can assert this without any attribution. But beyond that, the sentence is full of flaws. For one thing, it's not entirely clear that Russia does "oppose" an American missile shield. As the Times itself reported on July 23, 2001, "Russian officials have suggested that they may be willing to make some adjustments in the ABM treaty to allow a limited defense." For another thing, the missile shield the Bush administration is proposing is, alas, not robust enough to challenge the Russian arsenal. It would be useful against Iran, Iraq, North Korea and perhaps China, but it still wouldn't fully protect America in the event of a wholesale launch of the Russian missile arsenal.

Lost in Space: The cover story of today's New York Times magazine reports on space weaponry. One new satellite, to be launched in September, "features a new form of imaging called hyperspectral," the Times reports. "Space is already home to multispectral cameras, which can take a picture of an ecosystem and discern conifer from deciduous trees. But hyperspectral goes much further." This implies that there are no hyperspectral imaging systems yet in space. In fact, as Taylor Dinerman, the editor of SpaceEquity.com, emailed Smartertimes this morning to point out, the EO-1 (Earth Observing 1) satellite launched by NASA last year with a Hyperion hyperspectral imager on board is up and running.

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